Abstract
The essay attempts to delineate how Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception can be applied to theories of sign processes, and how it reworks the framework of the phenomenalist conception of communication. His later philosophy involved a reformulation of subjectivity and a resolution of the subject/object dualism. My claim is that this non-reductionist theory of perception reveals a different view of nature as we experience it in an expressive and meaningful interaction. The perspective that another living being has and communicates entails a form of depth, the invisible dimension of the visible or audible. These two aspects of perception and dialogue are intertwined in a dialectic of presence and absence, so that sense arises in the perceptual field rather than in subjectivity. This, I argue, is the most fundamental result of his theory. The origination of meaning in the workings of the chiasm of visible and invisible in perception opens up an objective sense of intersubjective nature. The essay also deals with the role of the phenomenological reduction; a suspension of beliefs and existence claims in experience. The reduction enables us to take a step back and look more closely at our understanding of nature in light of the historical and cultural influence on our thinking.
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Notes
The writing of the two works, La Prose du Monde and L’Origine de la vérité, was abandoned in 1959 when Merleau-Ponty focused on The Visible and the Invisible, the work that most explicitly represents his philosophical foundation for theses on truth and intersubjectivity.
A similar argument has been proposed by Sean Kelly (forthcoming) in his article “The normative nature of perceptual experience”, forthcoming. He argues that in The Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty describes how perception avoids unclear views of objects and that this normativity of experience belongs to experience itself and is not grounded in the subject’s take on it.
Contrary to Toadvine’s claim in Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature (Toadvine 2009), where the idea of an ethics of being is ruled out as far as the ontology of the flesh is concerned, I emphasize how the origination of sense in the sensible field, which is flesh, is constitutive of all truth, meaning and expression, and therefore ‘better’ or ‘truer’ perspectives. Cf. the statement (Toadvine 2009: 133): “A similar mistake has often been made by those who look to Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of flesh as the basis for new ethical principles in our relation with nature.” I base my argumentation on a different aspect of flesh, namely its founding function for sense and expression.
See for instance “Preobjective being: The solipsist world” in The Visible and the Invisible (Merleau-Ponty 1968).
By “access from the outside” I mean theories based on logical investigations that are intended to test the legitimacy of direct experience; or as in realism or empiricism; collectively called objectivism in this context.
See for instance Thomas Langan’s Merleau-Ponty‘s critique of reason, on language and expression, where Langan describes language as world (Langan 1966: 125).
References in the citation are to Merleau-Ponty 2003, French edition and English edition.
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Aarø, A.F. Merleau-Ponty’s Concept of Nature and the Ontology of Flesh. Biosemiotics 3, 331–345 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-010-9080-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-010-9080-2